A host of liberal church caucus groups are offering their support to anti-Israel student protests underway at college campuses, including at least two denominationally-funded agencies. Their vocal support for what has become an intersectional progressive cause has overridden concerns about antisemitism.
“We stand in solidarity with the students protesting in encampments across the country,” a “statement in solidarity with student protests for Gaza” signed by scores of groups reads. “We reaffirm our commitment to amplifying their voices, condemn the university administration officials’ violent response to their activism, and demand that universities remove the presence of police and other militarized forces from their campuses.”
The statement calls for a immediate ceasefire and an end to the U.S. government’s role in what it alleges to be an “ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.”
Several institutions of higher education have called on law enforcement to remove protesters blocking access to, and in some cases vandalizing, campus facilities after repeated warnings to disperse were disregarded.
Both the Presbyterian Church (USA) Office of Public Witness, which serves as the denomination’s Capitol Hill lobby office, and the American Baptist Churches USA have signed the statement “in solidarity with the students” protesting in encampments and otherwise to condemn Israeli military strikes in Gaza. The PCUSA office has accelerated its aggressive anti-Israel policies and charged the Middle East democracy as an “Apartheid” state.
The letter, citing the International Court of Justice, a federal judge in California (who ruled that his court did not have jurisdiction), and unnamed human rights organizations, claims that Israel’s actions in the Gaza war “plausibly” constitute genocide. Hamas and the October 7 attacks resulting in the deaths of more than 1,200 in Israel and the kidnapping of scores of hostages are unmentioned.
“We commend the students who are exercising their right to protest peacefully despite an overwhelming atmosphere of pressure, intimidation and retaliation, to raise awareness about Israel’s assault on Gaza – with U.S. weapons and funding. These students have come forth with clear demands that their universities divest from corporations profiting from Israeli occupation, and demanding safe environments for Palestinians across their campuses. The students’ courage and determination in the face of adversity inspire us all to take action and speak out against injustice wherever it occurs. As they risk everything right now, it is critical that all of us do everything we can to support them.”
Pro-Israel groups have documented anti-semitic signage at campus protests and recorded protesters blocking Jewish students’ access to campus buildings at institutions of higher education.
The statement of support is also signed by the liberal Alliance of Baptists, the American Friends Service Committee, liberal Catholic group Pax Christi USA, and the liberation theology group Sabeel. Several mainline caucus groups have also signed, including United Methodists for Kairos Response (UMKR), Episcopal Peace Fellowship-Palestine Israel Network, United Church of Christ Palestine Israel Network, Presbyterian Peace Fellowship, Israel/Palestine Mission Network of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and American Baptist Churches Palestine Israel Network.
Many of the anti-Israel caucus groups are highly visible participants at denominational governing conventions, including the United Methodist General Conference meeting this week in Charlotte, the Presbyterian Church USA General Assembly meeting June 25 – July 4 in Salt Lake City, and Episcopal General Convention meeting June 23 – 28, 2024 in Louisville. Each of the denominations will consider several anti-Israel resolutions, including language decrying Israel’s military conflict with Hamas as a “genocide” against Palestinians.
This now-customary criticism is aimed uniquely at Israel. Substantive accusations of genocide, including the ethnic cleansing of 120,000 Armenian Christians from Nagorno Karabakh by Azerbaijan in September, or the ongoing deaths of Christians in Nigeria at the hands of Islamist militants, draw little interest, just as atrocities in Syria’s civil war merited no strong demands.
Comment by David on May 3, 2024 at 8:05 am
Of course, the US does not financially support these other places as it does Israel. There was a recent article in the May 1st Atlantic by Elena Dudum.
“In the 19th century, before a wave of European Jews settled in Palestine following the Holocaust, early Zionists leaned on the mythology that the land was empty and barren. The movement advocated for the return of Jews to their ancestral homeland. In 1901, the Zionist author Israel Zangwill wrote in the British monthly periodical The New Liberal Review that Palestine was ‘a country without a people; the Jews are a people without a country.’
In 1969, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir was quoted in The Sunday Times of London: ‘[There is] no such thing as Palestinians … It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.” This idea has been similarly reused for more than a century, evolving very little. As recently as February 2024, Israeli Minister of Settlement and National Missions Orit Strock repeated the sentiment during a meeting of Israel’s Parliament, saying, “There is no such thing as a Palestinian people.’
Comment by Gordon Hackman on May 3, 2024 at 10:15 am
In other news, water is wet. This is about as predictable as the sunrise. These liberal denominations are on the wrong side of every issue, but thankfully, they are all dying.
I worked for an one of the more evangelical leaning American Baptist institutions for 6 years. Reading this makes me glad I’m no longer connected to that denomination in any way.
Comment by Abigail Taylor on May 3, 2024 at 12:58 pm
Religion is dying but the secular movement against Zionism is going strong and gaining. The apartheid state of Israel will eventually collapse due to international isolation. The people of Palestine deserve to be free.
Comment by Roger on May 3, 2024 at 4:05 pm
Prime Minister Golda Meir is correct. Palenstine is a name only of an area, just like the name of the Sahara Desert. It has been desolate since 70 AD as God said it would be until the Jews returned to their homeland. God blessed Israel and God blesses those who bless Israel and curses those who curse Israel.
Comment by Gordon Hackman on May 4, 2024 at 12:03 pm
Abigail Taylor, Israel is not an apartheid state.
Comment by Ted on May 7, 2024 at 1:39 pm
Well, David, it looks like we’ve found another lobotomized liberal, much like yourself. I bet you and Abigail would make a wonderful couple.
Comment by Palamas on May 7, 2024 at 2:50 pm
So, on the one hand, we have old fashioned far left anti-Semitism from Abigail. She has no idea what “apartheid” means, but she knows it’s bad so it must apply to the Joooooooos.
Then there’s David, objecting to Golda Meir speaking the truth. There is no historic Palestinian people (the term only came to be applied to the Arab residents of the region in the 1960s–that’s why the PLO was called the “Palestine Liberation Organization,” and not “Palestinian;” it referred to the region, not the people). There are Arabs who are not indigenous to the region, but came en masse in the 7th century in the Islamic invasion. They continued to be referred to simply as “Arabs” until it became politically useful to designate themselves otherwise, namely, when they wanted to become the 23rd Arab state. So Meir was correct, and virtually no one disputed what she said at the time.
So for the views of the far left, we can choose between anti-Semitism and ignorance. Some choice, huh?
Comment by Palamas on May 7, 2024 at 2:53 pm
The leadership, and especially the “Palestine” caucuses of the mainline churches, have been shot through with anti-Semitism for a long time. Some, like the PCUSA’s Israel-Palestine Mission Network, never really bothered to hide it. But now that traditionalists and evangelicals have been largely driven out, the Jew haters can let their freak flags fly.
Comment by John Reuter, Esq. (Ret.) on May 8, 2024 at 3:07 pm
Your screed here is unworthy of any rebuttal. Israel has been an abomination since the Day of Nakba! It was most unfortunate that the Zionists hijacked the Jewish faith to hide behind their evil designs, their abhorrent acts leading up to 1948 and their evil subsequent acts up to the present. Somehow, evil acts always have a way of being revealed even after over half a century of carefully carried out obfuscation of and obliteration of the truth from one decade to the next. Fortunately, time is often like incremental weak then strong waves of truth alternately scouring then crashing against the shoreline of lies, washing them away, revealing the truth beneath the sand, bright and liberating. And so it is now. The truth will set the Palestinians free, liberate their lands, and the Zionists will fade into the dusty pages of history.
Comment by Gayle Ataceri on May 8, 2024 at 10:35 pm
Well, for once something I can agree with the mainline churches on. If one is not blinded by false Zionist ideology, the facts are pretty clear that this is collective punishment, and carried out in bone chilling manner with torture, live burials, elementary aged children running away from the IDF shot in the head (even in West Bank), and the list goes on and on. There are many atrocities taking place in the world but this one is in unique in that my government and my fellow Christians are supporting the heinous acts.